Madeleine Thakur

Madeleine Thakur

Madeleine Thakur is chief of staff of The Children’s Movement of Florida. She firmly believes in promoting equal opportunities for all children, especially those in precarious circumstances.

A Miami native and one of five children, Madeleine was raised trilingual (English, Spanish, French) and is a proud graduate of Miami-Dade County Public Schools. She holds a B.A. in International Studies from the University of Chicago and a diploma from Sciences Po in Paris.

A strong supporter of opportunities for youth, she served for two years as a counselor for an after-school program on Chicago’s South Side and spent one year as a teacher’s assistant in the English-as-a-Second-Language classroom of a Chicago elementary school.

When she returned to Miami, Madeleine was a volunteer tutor at the Overtown Youth Center for several years. As a 2010 member of the Rotary Group Study Exchange in Lima, Peru, she visited locally funded preschools and childhood nutrition centers and observed the impact of early childhood investment, in centers across the city energized by strong parental and community support.

Before joining The Movement in September 2017, Madeleine spent nearly a decade at the Americas Society/Council of the Americas (AS/COA), a nonprofit business association that fosters dialogue and debate on economic, political, and social issues in Latin America and the Caribbean—including trade, infrastructure development, health care and education.

As director of the organization’s Miami office, she was responsible for crafting and executing program and communications strategies, as well as managing partnerships with the diplomatic corps, institutions of higher education, and community organizations. She worked closely with senior executives at dozens of COA member companies—including Citi, Greenberg Traurig, Google, Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft—and learned the importance of public-private cooperation in meeting societal challenges.

Madeleine is a past fellow of the New Leaders Council (NLC), a national civic leadership development program for young professionals, and has served on the board as curriculum co-chair and mentorship co-chair for the NLC Miami Institute. She and her husband, Mike, live in Miami.